10 Hardest Languages To Learn For English Speakers

On the other hand, the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers are those with foreign writing systems, tonality, and alien grammar. If you’re an English speaker and you’ve managed to become fluent in any of the 10 languages below, give yourself a pat on the back.

1. Basque

Basque (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A study by the British Foreign Office found that Basque was the hardest language to learn for English speakers. A dialect of the Basque people in Spain, the Basque language carries no syntactic parallels to English – despite having evolved in a region surrounded by Romance languages like Spanish and French.

As with many of the languages on this list, the Basque language is agglutinative. This means that words are formed, then altered with prefixes and suffixes. For example, the word “lege” means law in Basque, but the sentence “according to the law” wouldn’t be 4 distinct words, but instead would be “legearen arabera.”

Basque also uses case endings in order to indicate relationships between words. For example, the Basque word for “mountain” is “mendi”, but the phrase “to the mountain” is simply “mendira”. Although Basque is extremely challenging for English learners syntactically, it shares the Roman alphabet, and the pronunciation is relatively easy for English speakers.

2. Arabic

Arabic (Photo credit: Nasir Nasrallah)

Arabic is another one of the hardest languages to learn – some would even argue its the hardest. The first challenge for English readers learning Arabic is the script, which looks extremely foreign to anyone raised on the roman Alphabet. Many of the letters in Arabic have 4 different forms, and vowels are not included in writing.

Unlike with European languages, English speakers won’t find any similar sounding words in Arabic. To make things more complicated, in Arabic the verb generally comes before the subject and object, and they can be singular, dual, and plural. Just your average present tense verb will have 13 different forms. There are also 2 genders, as well as 3 noun cases.

There are also different dialects of Arabic. While most English leaders will study modern standard Arabic, there are also variations that are as different from modern standard Arabic, as French and Spanish are different from English.

3. Cantonese

Cantonese signs in Hong Kong (Photo credit: niiku23)

Cantonese is a Chinese dialect spoken in the Canton region of China (including Hong Kong). It shares its written form with Mandarin Chinese – or perhaps more accurately – it actually has no written form of its own and borrows the Mandarin writing system. However, the way Cantonese is spoken will differ than the way it is written using Hanzi characters.

Speaking of Hanzi characters, written Chinese is not phonetic. If you’re learning a new European language, or even an exotic phonetic language like Korean, you can at least sound out words you’re not familiar with. In Chinese, the writing system is pictoral, meaning that each character represents a different word. The only way to know the meaning of a character is to have it memorized, all 20,000+ characters.

To make things even more complicated, the exact same character will almost always have multiple meanings, depending on the context. The same sounding word can also have more than one written form, with each written form having a different meaning.

As difficult as the writing system is to grasp, the spoken dialect is perhaps even more complex. Compared to Cantonese, spoken Mandarin Chinese is a breeze to learn. Like Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese is a tonal language, which can be extremely confusing for English speakers. The same sound spoken in a different tone can hold a completely different meaning. And unlike Mandarin Chinese which has 4 tones, Cantonese has 8 tones, with each change in pitch and inflection re-shaping a word’s meaning.

4. Finnish

Finnish sign (Photo credit: Martin Terber)

Finnish has no Germanic or Latin influence, making its vocabulary completely alien to English speakers. Finnish grammar is also infamous for its difficulty. With 15 noun cases, sometimes just small differences can result in a huge difference in meaning. For example, “talotta” means “without a house” in Finnish, while “talolta” means “from a house.”

Fortunately, Finnish is a phonetic language and written in the Roman Alphabet, so despite the lack of common vocabulary and alien grammar, at least you’ll be able to sound out the words.

5. Hungarian

Hungarian keyboard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hungarian is in the same Finno-Ugric language family as Finnish. Although Hungarian does use the Roman alphabet, the pronunciation is significantly different from English. For one, it has vowel sounds that are completely alien to English speakers (á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í), as well as consonant clusters that will get your tongue tied up into knots (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs).

In Hungarian grammar, possession, tense, and number are not dictated by word order, but by suffixes. This makes the sentence structure seemingly flexible, but in reality, extremely similar sentences can take on completely different meanings with slight alterations in the suffixes.

6. Navajo

A collection of Navajo signs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not that you’re going to try learning Navajo anytime soon, but if you did, you’d be in for quite a challenge. Navajo is so unique that it was used during World War II as the basis for an unbreakable code used by the Americans in the Pacific War against the Japanese. By creating a code based on the Navajo language and using trained bilingual Navajo “code-talkers”, the Americans were able to create a code that was never broken by the Japanese.

Virtually everything in Navajo is done exactly the opposite as its done in English. It is a verb-centered language. Even descriptions are given through verbs, and English adjectives have no direct translation in Navajo. Another interesting feature of the language is that it has animacy – a hierarchy of animation determines what verbs a noun will take on. For example, nouns like human and lightning are at the top of the hierarchy, while children and large animals come after, and abstractions are at the very bottom.

7. Mandarin Chinese

Old Mandarin Chinese caligraphy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In discussing Cantonese, we already discussed the complexity of written Chinese. The lack of phonetics make it a hostile language to the learner.

Like Cantonese, Mandarin is a tonal language. This means that a simple change in pitch and/or inflection can completely modify the meaning of the same sound. To make spoken Mandarin easier for English speakers, Mandarin can be sounded out using “Pinyin”, a transliteration system that uses the Roman Alphabet to present the language phonetically. It was created by the Chinese government in the 1950s to help standardize the language.

Of course, Pinyin doesn’t make the tonal aspect of the language any easier. The sound Ma” for example can represent 5 distinct words, depending on the tone, or lack thereof. For example:

“Mā”, said with a high and level tone, means mother.

“Má”, said in a rising tone, means hemp.

“mǎ”, said in a tone that dips low and then rises back up, means horse.

“Mà”, said in a dropping tone, means to scold.

“Ma”, said in a flat, neutral tone, is used at the end of a sentence to indicate that a question is being asked.

As far as grammar goes, Mandarin Chinese is actually much easier than most other languages, since there’s no conjugation and words generally only have one grammatical form. However, it also posses unique challenges of its own. For example, Mandarin uses about a dozen adverbs that have no English equivalent.

8. Japanese

12 century emaki scroll (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unlike Mandarin Chinese, Japanese is actually extremely easy to pronounce for English speakers. The simple combinations of vowels and consonants used to make-up Japanese pronunciation is very easy for a native English speaker to grasp.

Unfortunately, written Japanese is even more difficult than written Chinese. It incorporates the Kanji pictoral characters from Chinese, and also incorporates additional characters that are exclusive to Japanese.

9. Estonian

Estonian grammar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Estonian has a rigid case system. In case you forgot, a case system is where words inflect depending on their grammatical function in a sentence. And with 14 cases, that’s a lot to keep in mind.

The many seemingly arbitrary exceptions to Estonian grammar rules also serve to make this language a challenge for English learners.

10. Polish

Polish sign (Photo credit: James Burke)

Like Estonian, the Polish grammatical system makes use of cases. Its also seems sometimes that Polish grammar actually has more exceptions than it has rules. While for example, a language like Germanhas 4 cases where proper usage can be deducted based on logical rules, the 7 cases in Polish often seemed to be used arbitrarily, rather than being based on a higher level rule. You simply have to be aware of each new usage through practice and study.

This is a very good list, however I’m not sure if the Arabic language is truly that difficult. Yes, it looks very intimidating at first glance — but in my experience it is a very logic language. You can learn the alphabet and pronunciation without too much trouble — unlike, say, Mandarin, which involves ridiculous amounts of memorization!

As a born and raised Estonian, I was taught there are 14 cases, not 12 as this article claims. Also the Estonian grammar book on a picture is in German – with other languages you have displayed the language look as it is – ie Finnish, but you have failed to show real Estonian. Perhaps next picture from Wikipedia would have been better to reflect the real language or ie http://estonianlanguage.blogspot.com/2010/04/estonian-locative-cases.html

Hehe, Estonian is SO complicated that it has been simplified here: 12 instead of 14 cases (I wonder which ones were the hard core ones that were left out?) and a German text instead of an Estonian (well, there are a lot of imported German words, true)

In the photo of the Finnish language: it is a sign of a veterinarian, first in Finnish and on the second line the same in Swedish, which the second official language in Finland used in coastal areas as the town of Porvoo (just East of Helsinki) where the sign is from. Borgå is the Swedish name of this town, so there is actually only one word in Finnish, if not counting the name of the town.

Just to be exact, Estonian language has 14 cases – having witnessed a few foreginers and also native Engish speakers learning the language I can at least say that even if the grammatics is difficult at times, the vocabulary and pronounciation are just a matter of being interested and practice pracice practice.

Despite that – it is amazing how quickly native English-speakers, who live in Estonia learn the Estonian language. These are people of great nations who have such an attitude towards culture of small-size nations. Thank you for this honour !

Please check your facts. First of all, I’m pretty sure you mean RomanIC languages, not RomanCE languages. Secondly, as a native Estonian speaker – we have 14 cases and the picture you are using to illustrate Estonian is not in Estonian at all but more like in old German. Yes, German was spoken in Estonia at certain periods in history, but our language is nothing like that.

I was working in Paris, and some times I did read a Finnish language newspaper in my office. Opposite of me worked one fellow from Scotland. He heard, that if you can pronounce the Finnish alphabets the Finnis way, you can read the Finnish text. With little training he managed to read the Finnish newspaper headlines to me so, that I did understand them. He did not understood, what he had read. Case proven. Finnish phonetic language.

“consonant clusters that will get your tongue tied up into knots (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs).”
Almost each of these consonant clusters occur in English, only their letters are “completely alien to English speakers”.

Chinese characters used in China are called hanzi. The characters used in Japan are called kanji. As though most of the people understand what kanji means in this context I found it a bit funny to say that Cantonese is written in kanji. Kanjis are orignally from China, so they are originally hanzi.

Basque, a dialect??? Of what exactly? It’s the only remaining pre-Indoeuropean (and therefore unrelated to Indoeuropean languages) language in Europe. Language, not dialect. The Basque Country spills into both Spain and France, and as such Basque is spoken in France as well, which the article fails to mention.

The Finno-Ugric languages are post-Indoeuropean, and therefore also unrelated to the majority of the European languages which are Indoeuropean (Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, etc).

I can only say that the Polish sign must have been written by someone who shouldn’t be in the sign-making business! Random lower-case letters in the middle of a word, spelling errors, spaces in the middle of a word.
That’s not to say that the language doesn’t deserve a spot on this list – anglophones really struggle

Namaste from India… I mean regards.
Wonderful to be be here..
वसुधैव कुटुमबकम् .. In Sanskrit .. It says .. World is our home.. It is oldest language we speak .. Right from Vedas.. Vedas that had all knowledges

While I admit Hungarian is a really difficult langauge to learn (and I’m a born Hungarian) there are some misunderstanding in the article.
The consonant clusters, raised as examples, are not actaully clusters. Hungarian uses letter-clusters to write down some sounds.
So:
sz is pronounced like in “sit”
zs is pronounced like the last phoneme in “camouflage”
dzs is pronounced like the “j” in “Joe”
ly is pronounced like the “y” in “you”
cs is pronounced like in “itch”
and so on… If you really examine Hungarian you will realise that we actually don’t reallylike to knot our tongues with difficult to pronounce consonant clusters, like German or even English does sometimes.
And the vowels: we use the same sounds like every other European langauges just write the differently.

Kanji are used in Japanese, I’m pretty sure by kanji, reference is made to hanzi.

Kanji: ” are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (hanzi)[1] that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana (ひらがな, 平仮名), katakana (カタカナ, 片仮名), Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet.”

I’m a Finnish speaker, but learned Swedish, English and German at my high school.
Just to let you know that your example of Finnish language is partially correct; the first line is Finnish language, the second line is Swedish language, which also is our official language, although only about 8% speaks that.

As a native Finnish speaker I would like to note that there are a lot of words in Finnish borrowed from Germanic and Latin languages. Sometimes only the time gap has made them not so easy to recognize. And learning the numbers is maybe the easiest in the world.

PS. An English-spoken person may find it a bit confusing that the first names in Finland are short and some basic rules are not the same as in English. For instance my name is typical Finnish male name eventhough it is short and ends with a letter A.

I’d also like to point out couple of things:
1. In Hungarian there is a typo “Finno-Uric” -> “Finno-Ugric”.
2. In Finnish picture the first row is Finnish and the second row is Swedish.

And then an opinion:
Finnish and Japanese pronunciation are close to each other but English differs a lot from both of them. For this reason many native English speakers talking in Japanese sounds very wrong to my ear. I don’t know how Japanese feel about this though.

Thank you for your interesting article. I’m a native Finnsh speaker. I can convince you that I’m struggling every day with my English. The text in your Finnish language section is not only Finnish, the lower line is Swedish, which should be realatively easy to understand for an English speaker.I bet she/he could easily figure out a word veterinär. It is so close to an English word veterinary. Thus the example given in that photo is not exactly correct.

To be honest. I’d say that Estonian is like finnish on steroids. Learn finnish, deduct many endings so that different forms sound the same, add irregularities that stemm from the fact that the literary language was made up of different dialects with no regularity in mind and then dip it into some german and russian, pluss it’s own development, pluss the three grade lenth system, sometimes difficult even for Estonians themselves to grasp. I’d say Estonian is more difficult than finnish.

Don’t be so ashamed of your northern cousins We may not know anything about how to ride a horse or eat paprika, but at least we know the correct personal insults for people who should crawl into another persons vagina

Some Caucasian languages are extremely complicated and should have been included in this list. They are split-ergative (more complicated syntactically than Basque), feature suffixaufnahme, have huge phoneme inventories with several dozens of consonants, lots of nominal cases, completely unrelated vocabulary to any Indo-European language etc.

I agree that some languages are not easy to learn. But they can be learned. The problem lies in the education system: no second or third language is thought still is many of the schools, which is in other countries is not the case. Languages, just like learning to play on a musical instrument, has to be thought at a young age, possibly in preschool. Believe me, it is old wives tales that multiple languages will confuse the child. It won’t. And at that age things don’t seem so difficult even if they are.

I’m so impressed with how nice the Estonian speakers are with the corrections, and while it makes sense they’d recognize the photo under Estonian has German, not their language, the fact that they all know it’s 17th century German is very impressive, to me at least.
The fact that they all write in perfect English is also something most Americans should make note of. I was born and raised in the USA, and I know that most of us are pretty darn lazy about learning a foreign language, then we have that really embarrassing faction of Americans who seem allergic to foreign language. What a sad loss for them. Most of my grandparents came from Norway and I’m currently learning Norwegian, I’ve taken 5 semesters. Learning Norwegian in my late 30′s is an entirely different, and slower, process than learning French as a kid and teenager, however it is a wonderful experience. I love being in a part of the country full of many wonderful people from many parts of the world and speaking wonderful, different languages. No matter how hard the language is, the effort is definitely worth the work, even if one doesn’t end up fluent, it really is all about the journey, not the destination. Kadi is right: practice! Practice! Practice! But that’s the most fun part anyway!

You write a lot of nonsense but, being Hungarian, I will limit myself to trying to correct the most obvious ones in the part about Hungarian.

“Hungarian is in the same Finno-Uric language family as Finnish.”
It’s Finno-Ugric, not Finno-Uric.

“Although Hungarian does use the Roman alphabet, the pronunciation is significantly different from English.”
The pronunciation of what? Of the language? Yes, the pronunciation of a foreign language is “significantly different from English”. What a surprise!

“For one, it has vowel sounds that are completely alien to English speakers (á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í), as well as consonant clusters that will get your tongue tied up into knots (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs).”
1. You mix up the concepts of “sound” and “letter”…
2. Most of the vowels you refer to are quite close to some English vowels. Unless you find “completely alien to English speakers” the vowels at the end of the English words “be” (that is how the Hungarian letter “í” is pronounced) or “hello” (that is roughly how the Hungarian “ó” is pronounced).
3. The consonants you refer to are not clusters at all. Unless the first sounds of the English words “see” (that is how “sz” is pronounced in Hungarian) or “yes” (that is how “ly” is pronounced) or “Jim” (that is how “dzs” is pronounced) “get your tongue tied up into knots”.

“In Hungarian grammar, possession, tense, and number are not dictated by word order, but by suffixes.”
You presumably want to say that possession, tense and number are expressed by suffixes. You may be surprised to learn that possession and number are expressed by suffixes in English as well (cf. Joe and house vs Joe’s house or one apple vs two apples). Is that so difficult?

“This makes the sentence structure seemingly flexible, but in reality, extremely similar sentences can take on completely different meanings with slight alterations in the suffixes.”
Again, that is like in any other language. You should be careful whether you want to say “Jack’s hit” or “Jack hits”.

If you have so little idea about languages or linguistics, why to write a post about it????

Am native Arabic, and i believe that Arabic is the hardest language for non-Arabic speakers. specially in grammar, even me i’m not very good with grammar. In old Arabic you should put diacritic for each letter because if you change a diacritic in the same word it gives a very different meaning. For example,
نَفِدَ > means : run out
نَفّذَ > means : execute
نَفَذَ > means : permeate
but you should learn it because it is the oldest language in history and the mother of all languages.

“Hardest” is obviously a difficult thing to quantify. However, I am certain it is more difficult for English speakers to learn Inuvialuktun (Western Canadian Inuit), Uyghur, or Tamil than it is to learn Polish or Arabic.

IMHO, We can try to add Indonesian Language as honorable mention, if we discount scarceness of user and writing system used.

With around 100 dialects available, elements of tonal language (e.g. makan (eat) can be want to eat if ended with increasing tone), different class of formality, different spoken and written language, and “no true grammar” in spoken language, etc, etc, but may be the hardest part to learn is that we Indonesian answer by context, not by word.

Despite the pronounciation is as easy as German or Japanese Language, The language itself too dependent to pre and subfixes. I don’t think there is a language that cram 4 or more fixes to a noun / verb at once.

e.g.

“Popularitas seseorang diukur dari ketertampakannya di media” (A person popularity can be measured by how visible his / her in media. This translation actually a little bit off connotatively).

That was a very interesting read! But I gotta say something: you know what’s shocking about Estonians? They are sooo smart, they have 14 cases, they know ancient German and yet they couldn’t be bothered to READ. THE. COMMENTS. Why would they keep commenting the exact same thing that 30 other people have already pointed out? I guess no matter the language, intelligence and wisdom are two separate things.

Japanese isn’t hard because it has different characters than chinese. Actually it has fewer characters, fewer sounds, and its new symbols are syllabes which are a breeze. What makes Japanese HARD is that Chinese is consistent and regular, meanwhile Japanese readings are extremely irregular, just like english pronounciation. That’s it, there is no correlation between a symbol and how it’s pronounced, so each word has to be learned separately; as a result, its alphabet has in practice +50000 “letters” even though it “only” has about +3000 symbols (most of those “letters” use 2-4 symbols).

I don’t know about the European languages, but I still believe the Asian languages like Mandarin are generally more difficult for English speakers to master.

For Mandarin, there’s no alphabet to fall back on, so the only way is to memorise thousands of characters. Forget memorising; even writing the characters by itself is already a challenge. Then, you’d have to remember the intonations of every character. And of course, you’d have to remember all the meanings of all the combinations of characters. The last bit is notoriously difficult especially if you do not have any sufficient exposure to the language.

The pronunciation is thankfully very easy, which perhaps gives Mandarin a less daunting impression since it’s pretty simple to learn to pick up conversational Mandarin. HOWEVER, beyond that, Mandarin is absolute hell. Having been exposed to a bit of Arabic, Japanese and other Chinese dialects like Cantonese, I don’t think any of them matches Mandarin in terms of difficulty of mastering.

AND, this is coming from a Chinese (albeit not from China). I was forced to learn it in school, but sadly I never managed to get the hang of it. As much as I would love to be given another chance to master it, the reality is that I’ll probably never be able to master it given that I’m becoming increasingly disconnected from the language as I grow older.

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Actually,to come to think about it, I agree that actually Asian languages are a lot harder than European ones because it does not follow the English Alphabet. My Mandarin Chinese teacher said that even if you write something even a BIT differently,it may mean something else entirely!

I’m Polish, and I confirm, it’s an extremely difficult language, with lots and LOTS of different forms for a single word, where nouns and adjectives, even when used in the same case, conjugate differently. Tough pronunciation, a lot of consonant compounds, like trz, szcz, prz, drz, and so on. Confusing spelling, lots of identical sounds written each in a different manner, like rz = ż, ch = h, rules for writing these are complicated and have many exceptions. A nightmare, I’m really glad I was born here, otherwise I would never know it in 100 years

For Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, they both use Hanzi character as their written form. The only difference is that people from Mainland China [including Guangdong province (where people speak Cantonese) but excluding Hong Kong] use simplified Hanzi Characters, while people from Hong Kong use traditional Hanzi Characters (Taiwan also uses traditional Hanzi). Originally, all areas in China use traditional Hanzi, but since the characters formation is more complex, the China government created the simplified version during 1950s – 1960s in order to improve literacy. Since Hong Kong was under British control at the time, the simplified version of Hanzi was not introduced. Therefore, Hong Kong uses traditional Hanzi until today. (No one is borrowing from anybody.) Here is an example. The word “country” is “國” in traditional Hanzi, and “国” in simplified Hanzi. I hope I clear things up. But the article is great otherwise

Yes indeed, Arabic definitely is the world’s hardest language to learn! Not only proper Arabic but slang Arabic is even harder as most of slang words are not in any dictionary known to a foreigner to Arabic as well as to many Arab speaking people

I learned Finnish almost fluently in 9 months. Since then I’ve been teaching Finnish for work experience on and off for a year. The fact that English is my first language was my biggest advantage. There’s no way that Finnish is the 4th most difficult for English speakers. It’s the simplest and most logical language I’ve ever come across.

I’m born in Hong Kong and I speak fluent Cantonese Mandarin and English. I speak French too, but not that fluent. For Cantonese, there is actually 9 tones and the last three tones cannot be prolonged when pronouncing. the 3 tones are grouped to form 入聲. This group does not exist in Mandarin. in my point of view, mandarin sounds much softer and polite than Cantonese does as it has only 4 tone. Thus there is only 3276 combinations of words’ pronunciation while canto has 10620 combinations. However it means when you learn mandarin it will be so much more confusing as the possibility of different characters having same pronunciation will be much higher. Moreover, mandarin is not officially used in china until 1909 when the Qing government officialise it. Canto has been developed into a mature language since 900 AD. If you’re learning Chinese for business, go for mandarin. It’s used as an official language and it is easier. but if you’re learning to understand Chinese culture better or simply for fun, learn Cantonese. It helps you understand ancient written Chinese better, it gives you a chance to learn the beautiful traditional characters and most importantly, over 120 million people are speaking (and writing) canto all over the world.